Gun Talk Radio: “More Guns Equal Less Crime. Duh.”

The FBI released its crime stats for the first half of 2010. We have more guns, more concealed carry folks, and we are almost six years past the expiration of the stupid Clinton “assault weapon” ban. The last two years have seen record increases in gun sales. So, with all these guns, how bad has crime gotten? It will come as no surprise to those with more than a room-temperature IQ that crime continues to go down.

According to the FBI, violent crime is down 6.2 percent over the same period in 2009, and homicide is down 7.1 percent. Further, robberies are down 10.7 percent, rapes down 6.2 percent, aggravated assaults down 3.9 percent, and burglaries dropped 1.4 percent.

Crime stats are subject to “tweaking” by police departments (who have been knows to downgrade crimes as a way of improving their performance numbers), but these are impressive numbers.

Just a touch more food for thought . . . homicides rose in the Northeast (can you say “harder to get a carry permit?”), but took a dramatic 12-percent dive in the South with expanded access to guns, like constitutional carry in Arizona.

It’s not possible to directly attribute these drops in crime to the increase in guns — there are just too many variables at work. But, we can say with absolute certainty that more ARs, more pistols, (we’ve seen two years of record gun sales), and more people carrying guns for their own protection (Alaska and Arizona removed the requirement for a permit!) has NOT resulted in an increase in violent crime or homicide.

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Some studies, including one by Freakonomics author Stephen Levitt and John Donohue, have advanced the theory that legalized abortion reduced the pool of unwanted children, and that it was those unwanted children that would have committed the crimes that haven’t occurred. That’s about as hard to prove as that meth-head criminals are smart enough to not turn to crime rather than get shot.

My own suspicion is that CompStat itself, the sharing and networking of information about crimes and offenders, and the expanded use of surveillance cameras, not as omnipresent as on TV but still significant, have each been a boon to law enforcement, which is why it pains me to see police tweaking the data to CompStat that might aid in apprehensions. The downside is that because we have become so good at catching criminals, we now incarcerate more people by percentage (756/100K) and number (2.3 million) than any nation in the world. Our closest competitor in each category is Russia at 629/100K and China at 1.57 million.

So we have less crime because so many criminals have been caught and put away. But we’re paying big bucks to keep them there.

Churchill said the only statistics he believed were the ones he made up himself.

2 years ago, ticket revenues were up huge on our local highways and the cops were touting the slight downtick in accident rates as a direct result of the increase in ticketing. Last year revenue was up yet again but so was the accident rate. No newspaper article. My guess is next year we’ll see another uptick in ticket revenue.

Though it’s nice to see less crime in a down economy, it’s hard to pin it on anything. Also with all the numbers manipulation we’ve seen from the government (lately? always?) what’s real anymore?

Mikeb30200 said: “Despite your “impressive” numbers I think it’s far from a given that more guns are the reason there’s less crime – if there really is less crime that is.”

Please take another look at the original release, and the last paragraph:

“It’s not possible to directly attribute these drops in crime to the increase in guns — there are just too many variables at work. But, we can say with absolute certainty that more ARs, more pistols, (we’ve seen two years of record gun sales), and more people carrying guns for their own protection (Alaska and Arizona removed the requirement for a permit!) has NOT resulted in an increase in violent crime or homicide.”